Zoom, zoom, zoom! What commercial is that from? When we learned that Tilly would be starting kindergarten through distance learning, I knew I had to create a dedicate space for her to work from. She is used to sprawling out on our dining table or in her play area and that just wasn’t going to cut it when school started.

I challenged myself to use only things we had at home as we’re going to renovate our office someday soon and I didn’t want to buy furniture for temporary use. We had some leftover shelves from when we did our built-ins in the family room that were already cut so I decided to try a faux marble effect on it.

First I rolled on 2 coats of leftover sample paint from stenciling our bathroom floors. Then, using a random feather that we had in the house, I made some freehand lines using white paint and moving my wrist back and forth. The key here is to do it randomly and try not to make anything too perfect. Then I went back with a paint brush and blended some parts in. I didn’t like how the first round turned out, so I rolled another layer of black on top and tried again.

Once I got to a point where I was happy with the marble look, I added two coats of leftover polyurethane on top to seal it and protect the surface for all of the paint, marker, crayon, pen, play doh, and glue that would grace us with its presence. Five months into school and it’s holding up fantastically.

Once the desk part was done, I stole some nightstands from other parts of the house and used those as the two bases/stands. It was the perfect depth and the wood tones looked nice next to the marble.

The wall sconce was a purchase for the nursery nook but I never hung it up, so we used it here. It’s nice that it swivels so she can light whatever she needs to.

I did purchase some acrylic shelves to get some of the clutter off of her desk. The bulletin board was a gift from my cousin. The alphabet art is from Juniper Print Shop. I was able to pull this together over a weekend and the space has served her well so far!